[Remote] Backend Engineer - Personalization - Tunesday

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Spotify is a leading music streaming service known for its innovative features that enhance user experience. They are seeking a Backend Engineer to join the Personalization team, focusing on developing systems that provide personalized music recommendations and improve user engagement. The role involves designing real-time services and maintaining large-scale data pipelines while collaborating with data scientists and product managers.ResponsibilitiesDesign and operate services that serve personalized recommendations to users in real time, including Smart Shuffle and Discover WeeklyBuild and maintain large-scale batch pipelines in Scala/Scio and Flyte that generate candidate pools, bloom filters, and personalization signals for hundreds of millions of users dailyDevelop and maintain components within Spotify's Sessions Platform (SSP) that power playlist experiences end to end, from candidate retrieval to final servingCollaborate with data scientists to operationalize research ideas, for example, expanding our definition of music discovery beyond simple listening recency, or integrating audio attributes like BPM and musical key into recommendation rankingBe a technical leader in an autonomous, multi-functional team: drive architecture decisions, set engineering standards, and help the team ship faster with higher confidenceSkillsYou have several years of experience as a Backend Engineer building and operating services at scale, with strong Java skills and comfort with gRPC and Protocol BuffersYou have hands-on experience with large-scale data pipelines, ideally Apache Beam/Scio or a similar batch processing framework (Spark, Flink) and with pipeline orchestration tools like Flyte or similarYou are comfortable working across the full backend stack: from online serving (Bigtable, Memcached, low-latency APIs) to offline data (BigQuery, Dataflow, dbt)You bring curiosity about recommendation systems, search, or personalization, you want to understand not just how to build a system, but whether it is actually improving the user's music discovery experienceYou care about quality and know what it means to ship reliable, observable, production-grade systems you think about SLOs, on-call burden, and correctness as part of your designYou thrive in an environment of experimentation and fast iteration; you use data to make decisions and are comfortable working with data scientists to evaluate the impact of changesExperience with GCP (Kubernetes/GKE, Gantry, Dataflow, BigQuery, Bigtable) and Elasticsearch is a plusBenefitsHealth insuranceSix month paid parental leave401(k) retirement planMonthly meal allowance23 paid days off13 paid flexible holidaysCompany OverviewSpotify is a commercial music streaming service that provides restricted digital content from a range of record labels and artists. It was founded in 2006, and is headquartered in Stockholm, Stockholms Lan, SWE, with a workforce of 5001-10000 employees. Its website is http://www.spotify.com.Company H1B SponsorshipSpotify has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 15 in 2026, 140 in 2025, 117 in 2024, 169 in 2023, 259 in 2022, 172 in 2021, 115 in 2020. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.